Ok, I admit: I’m a details freak and I consider this part a vital function of my work. Being careful about details is in my opinion the difference between wrong and right and success and failure. I’m expecting someone to prove me wrong since I’m tired of skipping through websites that don’t even deserve anyone’s attention, still they get it because they’re getting some publicity.
Pic credits: Delhi’s Telecommunication. Fully wired! by Brajeshwar
Sooner or later, if those detials aren’t solved, and there’s nobody to notice them missing, failure comes in. So, what makes details so important?
I’ve compiled a nice list of data, which you can easily browse, print, save, and have a look on it later, whenever you want to improve the way you do things.
Why do it?
- to increase the quality of your work: Quality attracts quantity not the way around, if you want people around you to be happy about your work, show them you care. They’ll notice it in every margin and corner of your final product
- it pays off faster: websites/web applications that are quality built, are getting a higher amount of visitors than the buggy ones. While developers are solving bugs in one app, the others are nicely thinking on what can be improved, or added. Makes the difference and users are happy.
Like any serious thing, you don’t need too many arguments to understand that you need it. This is one of those serious things. Let’s find out how to implement the attention to details.
How to do it?
- where there’s a will, there’s a way: you need to be willing to increase the quality of your work, this by default will turn you into a machine focused on doing things right.
- patience: experience and spotting problems is a skill that builds up in time with practice a proper QA oriented minset all the way there
- focused POV: it requires that you should focus on the design of the feature, thinking from the perspective of the user, not of the developer (better to think how it would be easier for me to use this feature as a regular user, rather than a programmer)
- there’s some more left: always ask yourself, is there anything else that I should consider before saying “I’m done with this for now”? If it is, write it down, work on it later. Have sessions where you prepare next release.
- don’t stumble: do major things as planned, while small bits are written down for later or solved at the end of the day when energy is lower but easier things can be done
Look again on the list above, it’s very important, if you don’t understand ask me via email or by posting a comment, I want to make sure you get this right.
How to get started?
- Evaluate the situation: look at your current work, see what things are there and they don’t work, be honest about it, write it down
- Prioritize those things with two option: important (1), not so important (0)
- Start working on the important issues first, while keeping in mind what you have learned inside this blog post, write those new details down, move on and then go back to step 1) and repeat until you’re sure you have a decent product
The last step can spread over a period of a day, up to few months, depending on how big your project is. This is the only way to making sure you are the best in yoour area of activity. If things wouldn’t go like this, all those engineers from Google or Youtube will have no reason to be employed now.
You are not doing it right if:
- you developed paranoic thinking: extreme care for details is not good either, and it will take you nowhere and it’s going to slow you down
- you end up with one big, unmanageable TODO list
You are doing it right if
- quality improves and you deliver a product that stands out
- you can estimate project duration easier and you always have in mind the “details” but without loosing your focus
- you always have a nice “todo” which you can use for your next release candidate and stakeholders love that
Got to read: http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture Have a look at the “Lessons Learned”, I like the “Constant iteration on bottlenecks” solution, that shows the cyclic way of the three steps I represented above. Reading the whole article is actually not a very bad idea either.
